


Exposed

by imgoingtocrash



Series: Pepperony Week 2020 [3]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Fluff, Light Angst, Non-Graphic Discussion of Torture, Pepperony Week, Post-Iron Man 1, Romantic Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:00:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24899584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imgoingtocrash/pseuds/imgoingtocrash
Summary: “You know how soulmates share things, sometimes?” Pepper asks. “Emotions, dreams, that kind of thing?”It seems like a bit of a non-sequitur, but before Tony answers his usual response to soulmate questions—I probably don’t have one, I don’t really want one, and I think half of the connection shit is a psychological placebo people just want to believe in—the relevance clicks.“Ah. Your person’s going through something.”“Went through,” she answers curtly. “I fell asleep on the couch and I saw…”She shakes her head, haunted.She doesn’t elaborate.Soulmates are connected in many facets, meaning sometimes your soulmate knows things you wish they didn’t. Pepper knows the details of the horrors Tony went through to get back home. Tony doesn’t know Pepper is his soulmate.
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Series: Pepperony Week 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1796032
Comments: 19
Kudos: 138





	Exposed

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Pepperony Week Day 5! I did gifsets for Days 3 and 4, [which can be found here](https://imgoingtocrash.tumblr.com/tagged/pepperonyweek20).
> 
> I was thinking about Pepper being on Tony’s mind while he was being tortured, and that led to the idea that in a soulmate AU where being soulmates means being connected in a deeper way, Pepper might have a deep understanding of what Tony went through that he was never planning to tell anyone in the first place.
> 
> Enjoy!

When he finds Pepper, she’s next to the pool, sobbing.

This is only odd because Pepper initially astonished him with the fact that she really didn’t cry. Not as a general rule, but more in the service of doing her job. He’d gotten a lot of assistants to the point of tears before her. 

In contrast, Pepper seemed pretty resistant to bringing any strong emotion to work but anger or frustration with Tony specifically. She showed a sort of calming empathy and compassion to her other co-workers in a way that was nothing but composed and professional. Hell, she even managed to befriend Rhodey and Happy outside of their shared closeness to Tony.

It’s possible that the first time he’d ever seen her shed a tear at all was when he and Rhodey touched down from Afghanistan.

He doesn’t know what to do with her like this.

He’s never considered himself a coward by any means, but he’s genuinely considering backing away from the sliding glass doors of his back porch and pretending he hasn’t seen a thing.

She catches him in the corner of her eye first.

“Mister Stark,” she croaks out, loudly sniffling and trying to wipe away the evidence of her emotional breakdown. “Sorry, I’ll just—give me a minute, I’ll—“

“No,” he says awkwardly. A second ago he was desperate to get away from her tears, but it’s the polite thing to do, isn’t it? The nice thing? The friendly thing? They’re friends as much as anything else, right? 

_You’re all I have too, you know._ That meant something. She watched him have an emotional breakdown or two, maybe it’s his turn.

“No, Potts, it’s fine, you’re—you’re fine.” He coughs, stepping out into the warm California night. “Well, not fine, I guess, but…yeah. You can stay. Whatever.”

Pepper laughs wetly. “God, you’re terrible at this.”

“Yeah, well.” He lets the retort hang unfinished. He can’t deny it.

The moment continues to sit a little awkwardly, their continued silence soundtracked by the sound of the waves cresting against the cliffside.

He sighs, surrendering to—whatever it is propelling him to keep standing there instead of taking her dismissal of his abilities and just walking away.

He remembers he's still sore from the fight with Obie when he joins her on the lounge chair she’s occupying. 

It’s still weird to think about. 

His last fight with Obie had been years ago. His mentor—if he’d ever meant a thing he said to Tony, ever—was in the right. Tony was strung out in a bad way after his parents’ ten-year death-iversary, and they’d butted heads over it. Instead of letting the behavior slide, Obie was insistent on rehab, and Tony was insistent that there wasn’t a problem to fix in the first place. He was content at the time to let the world burn down around him, to live in the high, to die on the high.

Obie won, in the end. 

Tony’s unsure how to be thankful of that, when this is where it led them. Maybe it saved a few people’s lives, Tony surviving into his thirtieth birthday, edging too close to his fortieth, now. It doesn’t feel that great right now, but maybe one day he’ll feel like he earned his life twice-over after spending so long attempting to head into an early grave.

As if aware of where his head is at just by the twinge of his hip when he sits, Pepper’s hand finds his in the reflecting lights of the pool.

Sometimes he has a whole thing about personal space, but this is Pepper, always an exception. She’s always gotten to the core of him faster than anyone. He probably owes her at least a fraction of that.

Tony sighs again. He doesn’t move his hand from under hers. 

“Okay. Let’s hear it.”

“Tony, you don’t have to—“

“No, no, come on. It must really be something, to get you down.”

She looks at him dubiously. “I think there was a compliment buried in there somewhere.”

“Oh, you already know how— _“_ He makes an all-encompassing gesture at her, “ _you_ , you are. Also, you’re dodging the question. That’s my gig, and I don’t appreciate plagiarism. That’s why our legal team kicks such an amazing amount of ass.”

Pepper rolls her eyes, but relaxes into the seat, stretching her legs out in front of her.

“You know how soulmates share things, sometimes?” Pepper asks. “Emotions, dreams, that kind of thing?”

It seems like a bit of a non-sequitur, but before Tony answers his usual response to soulmate questions— _I probably don’t have one, I don’t really want one, and I think half of the connection shit is a psychological placebo people just want to believe in_ —the relevance clicks.

“Ah. Your person’s going through something.”

“Went through,” she answers curtly. “I fell asleep on the couch and I saw...”

She shakes her head, haunted.

She doesn’t elaborate.

“How do you know it was…real? Not just, you know, a regular, bad dream?”

“I know him. I know it happened. I knew it was bad, but he acted like it was fine, so I never thought…I didn’t know the whole story.”

“I didn’t know you had a soulmate,” Tony replies neutrally. He always figured it was a possibility, but Pepper spends so much time dealing with him that she doesn’t have much of a personal life to speak of. She complains about that, specifically, quite often.

Pepper gives a resigned sort of shrug. “I know he’s my soulmate, but he doesn’t know I’m his. At least, I don’t think he does. I don’t know how I feel about it yet, and I figured he would never reciprocate anyway, so.”

He attempts to tease, to bring it back to the lighthearted banter he’s more comfortable with. “Let me guess, it’s someone from the DOD. No, the Air Force. One of Rhodey’s buddies? Who’s still unmarried in that pool, let’s see…”

He taps his chin in a show of thought, but she’s looking at her feet, digging her heels into the concrete beneath them. Clearly not the moment for levity, and obviously something is still bothering her.

“It was that bad? Whatever happened to him?” Tony chances. She’s been close-lipped on it so far, but maybe she really just wants to talk it out and wasn’t sure if he would engage. Not like he’s had a great track record with personal, emotional conversations.

Pepper breathes in, as if girding herself for attack.

“He was tortured. They shoved his head under water. Over and over again. They beat him and burned him and starved him, just because they could.” 

She looks directly into his eyes. “They almost killed him, and that was his reward for still living: his heart forced to beat by a fucking car battery.”

“That’s—“ He balks, physically distancing himself with a jolt of his hand escaping hers. That’s _his_ story, _his_ heart beating on and on and on even when he wished it would stop.

But that means...that’s not possible. No way.

“Pepper, you can’t be saying—“

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn't you tell Rhodey, or Happy, or—“ She sheds another tear, swiping it off her cheek before leaning forward. “Tony, you were awake on the table when they—“

“Don’t.” His arms have moved protectively in front of his chest. He doesn’t know when that happened. 

Thinking about the surgery means thinking about the torture and the shitty not-coffee and Yinsen bleeding out and Obie whispering _breathe_ before pulling the arc reactor out of his chest.

“Just—don’t.”

He’s exposed in a different way than the times his heart was in danger before. She saw. She knows. He didn’t _want_ to talk about it, so he _didn’t_ talk about it and now it’s just— _here_ , sitting in the empty space between them on the lounge chair in his own backyard.

“Tony—“

“No, just—stop. You can’t just expect me to address my bullshit like that when you’ve known—“ He pauses. “How long have you known that we’re—that I’m your—“

“Oh,” she replies, the hint of a blush resting over her freckles. “That’s—not as long as you’d think, I guess. I didn’t know when we met.”

Tony stands so that he can pace.

He tries to think back to their first meeting, that disaster of Pepper screaming and almost spraying Happy in the face and how he’d simply been…enraptured by the whole thing. She wasn’t a security threat. She was smart. She was _right_. What a new combination that would be to have around, Tony thought.

Was there something more to it? Had he simply… _known_? Who she was? What she was to him? A lot of people talked about that moment—two soulmates meeting, fate coming true, insert romanticized comment here—but he’d always figured if it was true he would really know, not stumble along for years after like everything was normal.

Pepper had just established a new normal with her presence. He still drank too much. He still didn’t do everything Obie wanted. But he was late to less meetings. He ate whatever takeout Pepper shoved in front of him instead of consuming an entirely liquid dinner. He started drinking those weird green juice shakes that she tried as a fad cleanse and ended up hating.

“I always felt like we were—connected, I guess, but I didn’t think it was anything different. Any dreams we shared as kids were so…benign. I saw your parents a few times, now that I think about it. But the details were always fuzzy, like you could barely remember them either.”

That would be the alcohol and drugs, he assumes. Or maybe that he didn’t want to remember parts of his childhood, and he sure as shit wouldn’t have wanted to share them, either.

Pepper’s childhood dreams, though…yeah, he definitely remembers a few images of the suburbs as he’d always seen them on TV and in movies. Bike riding, public school, a driveway on the cul-de-sac with a basketball hoop. Nothing to signal who his soulmate was or that it would be his future personal assistant.

Pepper smiles to herself a little, bringing him back into the moment and away from trying to parse out what might or might not have been signs from the universe that he did in fact have a soulmate out there.

“When you were captured I saw this—moment. Something so simple, just a day in the office. I was helping you go through a packet of briefings, you were doodling blueprints on a napkin from lunch. I recognized the blueprints and then I saw…myself. I’d never seen that, but I could feel the difference. You were thinking about me, over there. A few times, actually.”

He thinks back to his time in captivity. In between drownings and beatings, he dreamed. Sleep was escape. Sleep was not feeling every acute beat of his heart underneath the rudimentary metal contraption against his chest.

He dreamed of home. He remembered the view from his house showing up in exquisite detail. It felt like hours, that dream like a video on loop: the warm breeze, the salty air, listening to the birds squawk.

He did dream of Pepper. Sharply. Clearly, when everything else was muddled and bleeding and raw. He only questioned it briefly—he was too pleased to have something to hold on to.

“Yeah. I guess I did,” he admits, having no clue what it means or what his feelings are about that fact in this moment.

She gives him a wry smile, somewhere between teasing and genuine.

“You see me differently, you know. That’s how I knew it wasn’t my own mind. It was your memories. Your feelings.”

“You see me differently, too.” He sits back down next to her as a show of sincerity. “You always have.”

“I thought I did.” Pepper sobers again, picking at a fingernail. “But then I saw…everything and I just—I feel so stupid. I didn’t see it. I knew you were different than before, but I never thought it was because of—you shouldn’t have had to go through that to—“

“But I did,” he interrupts. “It happened. It is what it is. And we stopped Obadiah from doing a lot of bad things because of it.”

He taps her shoulder with his own. “We,” he emphasizes, “make a good team.”

Pepper looks up at him, a hesitant smile spreading her lips apart.

They sit in silence for a few seconds, but he can’t take not asking anymore.

“So what are we going to do about the whole—“ He tries to make a gesture for soulmates, but comes up a bit empty. “Thing?”

Pepper shrugs. “Like I said, I don't know how I feel about it either.”

He doesn’t bring up the fact that she thought he would never reciprocate. That has implications that he might, and he can’t just make that call in the heat of the moment. For once in his life, he can’t just leap before he looks because they’re maybe-probably soulmates. That’s not fair to either of them.

“It could be fun, you and me,” he jokes instead, waggling his eyebrows. Deflect, deflect, put on a show.

Pepper sees right through him. She doesn’t even good-naturedly roll her eyes.

“A lot has changed already.” Pepper tucks an escaped strand of hair back behind her ear. Even make-up-mussed and puffy-eyed from crying, she’s got this elegant beauty about her.

He shakes his head to clear the thought.

“It might be easier if we just…forget about it for a while. Keep things as they were until we figure it out.”

As they were. 

How pragmatic. How Pepper.

As if he doesn’t look at her now and automatically think _soulmate_. He thinks of all the things he’s never told her, all of the things he thinks he could one day if he let himself.

All of this wasn’t really sudden at all, then, was it?

“Sounds good,” he agrees. They have time to figure it out. Besides, she wouldn’t take him seriously if he _did_ profess whatever his feelings for her are right now.

He stands to leave, but turns, shoving his hands into his pockets as if it will help control how much emotion enters his voice when he says, “Thank you.”

Pepper tilts her head in silent questioning.

“You didn’t ask for this. For me and everything that happened to me over there. And I’m sorry you had to see it, but…thanks. Thank you for caring and for still being here, after everything with Obie.”

This time she allows her smile to grow fully, looking up at him in the faint moonlight. “Of course, Mister Stark.”

It’s the end of the conversation, but there’s always been this undertone to them, and it has always been about more than either of them have admitted.

“Goodnight, Miss Potts.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is shorter, but I actually really enjoyed sitting with it. It’s Tony being exposed emotionally and Pepper’s knowledge of them being soulmates being exposed literally. I didn’t mean to get so deep into Tony’s head in a soulmates prompt, but Tony’s perspective freshly out of IM1 combined with this reveal was calling to me, and I like how it turned out.
> 
> As always, comments, kudos, etc. are appreciated! And if you like Pepperony, please go check out my other works from this week and give them a read!


End file.
